Valentin Pletzer has noticed that Google Discover is showing some AMP labels for stories but when you click on the story, Google is not taking the user to the AMP version, the AMP URL, but rather the canonical URL, the main URL of the story.
Valetin wrote "anyone ever seen that Discover teases an AMP (marked with the flash icon & card url in the feedback) but then sends the user to the canonical URL anyways?" Brodie Clark noticed this as well, he said "Just tested out some articles in my feed and seeing similar. Keen to know more on this also."
Here is what it looks like:
Here is an actual english example so instead of https://t.co/FzTqRgEc8l Google Discover sends the user to https://t.co/DrZqyeIaFp pic.twitter.com/7UCzvQfSca
— Valentin Pletzer (@VorticonCmdr) July 15, 2020
So instead of being sent to https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/07/14/google-chrome-battery-life-memory-performance-upgrade-update-chrome-browser/amp/ (notice the AMP in the URL), he was sent to https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/07/14/google-chrome-battery-life-memory-performance-upgrade-update-chrome-browser/
I asked maybe it was related to Google's efforts to show the real URL for AMP and he said no.
I wouldn't think so because our websites don't support that and the looking at the logfiles it's the normal webpages not the AMP that get accessed. Of course this can be a possibility for others but to me it doesn't look like it.
— Valentin Pletzer (@VorticonCmdr) July 15, 2020
Maybe Google is testing dropping AMP more and more? I mean, there are signs of it.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: This was probably a bug:
It looks like as of today Discover is going back to normal. Meaning that cards marked with the flash icon are actually sending users to the AMP – as one would expect. cc @rustybrick https://t.co/hL1AjANWIp
— Valentin Pletzer (@VorticonCmdr) July 30, 2020
